07/10/2015

When leftist Bolivian president Evo Morales met with Pope Francis yesterday, he gave the pontiff a “communist crucifix”—a carving of Christ crucified on the hammer of a hammer and sickle. Clearly uncomfortable with the blasphemous gesture, Francis shook his head and is reported to have said “No está bien eso” – “This is not ok.”

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While we can’t know for sure what Espinal intended his statue to mean, Morales appears to have clearly missed the irony of portraying the symbol of communism as an instrument of death and torture.

While it’s difficult to determine exactly how many people died because of communism, it is estimated that at least 94 million died in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe, because of the ideology. As John J. Walters notes, during the 20th century “more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism’s total by only 9 million.”

Because of the number of Christians who were martyred under communist rule, it is perhaps fitting our Lord should be displayed as suffering and dying on this symbol of evil and perverted ideology. The “communist crucifix” is certainly blasphemous, but it also accurately portrays the true meaning of the hammer and sickle.

03/05/2015

In "What Really Scares the New Atheists", John Gray argues that Friedrich Nietzsche represents the type of morality that New Atheists haven't really dealt with. Unlike the New Atheists today, who absurdly argue that science can support a liberal morality, as a classical scholar, Nietzsche recognized the imprints of Christianity on liberal morality and, from that recognition, created a scathing critique of both Christianity and liberalism. Mr Gray writes:

The new atheists rarely mention Friedrich Nietzsche, and when they do it is usually to dismiss him. This can’t be because Nietzsche’s ideas are said to have inspired the Nazi cult of racial inequality – an unlikely tale, given that the Nazis claimed their racism was based in science. The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheist should serve.

It’s a familiar question in continental Europe, where a number of thinkers have explored the prospects of a “difficult atheism” that doesn’t take liberal values for granted. It can’t be said that anything much has come from this effort. Georges Bataille’s postmodern project of “atheology” didn’t produce the godless religion he originally intended, or any coherent type of moral thinking. But at least Bataille, and other thinkers like him, understood that when monotheism has been left behind morality can’t go on as before. Among other things, the universal claims of liberal morality become highly questionable.

It’s impossible to read much contemporary polemic against religion without the impression that for the “new atheists” the world would be a better place if Jewish and Christian monotheism had never existed. If only the world wasn’t plagued by these troublesome God-botherers, they are always lamenting, liberal values would be so much more secure. Awkwardly for these atheists, Nietzsche understood that modern liberalism was a secular incarnation of these religious traditions. As a classical scholar, he recognised that a mystical Greek faith in reason had shaped the cultural matrix from which modern liberalism emerged. Some ancient Stoics defended the ideal of a cosmopolitan society; but this was based in the belief that humans share in the Logos, an immortal principle of rationality that was later absorbed into the conception of God with which we are familiar. Nietzsche was clear that the chief sources of liberalism were in Jewish and Christian theism: that is why he was so bitterly hostile to these religions. He was an atheist in large part because he rejected liberal values.

Bill Vallicella has a worthwhile commentary on this specific point, "Nietzsche and the New Atheists", at Maverick Philosopher. The challenge that Nietizsche presents to atheists, New and otherwise, is that they have to be careful about how they talk about morality. In the West, people take a Christian framework for granted and don't realize that terms like 'rights' or 'equality' are nonsense sans God. The challenge isn't an argument for God's existence; rather, a call for atheists to take the nihilism that their worldview implies seriously.

02/18/2015

The life of a monk ought at all times to be Lenten in its observances but because few have the strength of this, we urge that in LEnt they should maintain a life of complete purity to make up, during these holy days, for all the careless practices throughout the rest of the year.- St. Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict

Today is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the Lenten season for Western Christians. For those who are unaware of the nature of the liturgical season, the discipline of Lent is characterized by penance, abstinence and alms-giving. In general, Lent is reorientation one’s life towards God in preparation for Easter.

In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume rails against the monkish virtues behind the fasting tradition of the Lenten today. He characterizes them as worse than useless, but genuine vices that don’t encourage what is good and proper in human life:

Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man's fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? (EPN: IX.9)

On the issue of the monkish virtues, Hume swings and misses. His treatment completely whiffs the issue. He entirely misses the point and, in missing the point, helps to set up two hundred years of similarly missing the point, especially by philosophers of the analytic tradition. Without the monkish virtues, which focus on what we center our attention around, ethics becomes merely about the rules of social interaction. That grand tradition of missing the significance of the monkish virtues culminates in Peter Singer’s imbecile claim that “sex raises no unique moral issues at all.”

The monkish virtues have nothing to do with being a valuable member or society or in enjoying a glass of wine. The monkish virtues are about orientating our lives in their proper directions. When a Catholic abstains from a hamburger on Ash Wednesday, he isn’t doing so out of some sorry sense of self-loathing or out of a notion that hamburgers are bad on certain days of the year. If he were to reach for one in a buffet line and then remembers, “It’s Ash Wednesday!”, he is doing neither. What he is remembering is that, though hamburgers (when properly prepared at least) are certainly something that are good, that they are not the good that he should orientate his life around.

Human life is characterized by fragility. Memento homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. Time will break everything around us, be it our laptops or pets, and eventually it will break our mortal coil. To orientate our lives around fragile things is to tie ourselves to ashes and dust. Although, as part of this impermanent world, we need to live our lives within it, we ought not base our lives around something as impermanent as food and drink, other people or our pets. We can bring out the full Platonic beast and question the reality of this fragile world, but that’s not a direction I’m all that interested in traveling down.

Hume might retort that death and fragility doesn’t matter. That it’s an event that should have no impact on our lives and that we should be therefore not care abut it. C.S. Lewis responded wonderfully to such a mindset in “A Grief Observed”:

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death.And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

Death does matters. We need to therefore be mindful to what we cleave to. The monkish virtues help us to remember that our habits bind us to fragile. As Pope Clement exhorts the Corinthians in his letter to them: “Let us keep our eyes firmly fixed on the Father and Creator of the whole universe, and hold fast to his splendid and transcendent gifts of peace and all his blessing.” The monkish virtues help us to break away from that which is fragile in the world and to look towards that which is ever-lasting.

02/13/2015

Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella has a worthwhile meditation, "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread," on the interpretation of the Our Father's fourth petition at Luke 11:3:

I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessory prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, as does the nimrod who prays to win the lottery. Worse still is one who prays for the death of a business rival.

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For a long time I perhaps naively thought that 'daily bread' had to refer to physical bread and the other necessities of our material existence. So for a long time I thought that there was a tension, or even a contradiction, between 'daily bread' and 'supersubstantial bread.' A tension between physical bread and meta-physical bread.

But this morning I stumbled upon what might be the right solution while reading St. John Cassian. The same bread is referred to by both phrases, and that same bread is spiritual or supersubstantial, not physical. 'Supersubstantial' makes it clear that 'bread' is to be taken metaphorically, not literally, while 'daily' "points out the right manner of its beneficial use." (Selected Writings, p. 30) What 'daily' thus conveys is that we need to feed upon spiritual bread every single day. On this reading, the fourth petition is as spiritual as the others, and the whiff of superstition and idolatry that I found offensive is removed.

President Obama personally added a reference to the Crusades in his speech this week at the National Prayer Breakfast, aides said, hoping to add context and nuance to his condemnation of Islamic terrorists by noting that people also “committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

But by purposely drawing the fraught historical comparison on Thursday, Mr. Obama ignited a firestorm on television and social media about the validity of his observations and the roots of religious conflicts that raged more than 800 years ago.

On Twitter, amateur historians angrily accused Mr. Obama of refusing to acknowledge Muslim aggression that preceded the Crusades. Others criticized him for drawing simplistic analogies across centuries. Many suggested that the president was reaching for ways to excuse or minimize the recent atrocities committed by Islamic extremists.

Mr. Obama’s remarks were certainly silly. The Crusades were a historical phenomena that were spread out over centuries and which involved the interaction of many distinct power centers in Europe and beyond. Even talking about the Crusades as THE Crusades doesn’t do them historical judgment. They are multifaceted and complex. For that reason, comparing them to ISIL is a silly rhetorical ploy.

ISIL is a relatively recent event. ISIL can be just a flash in the pan once everything is said and done. Furthermore, as compared to the heterogenous factions within (almost) any single Christian crusade, it is as close to a single entity as one can get, being unified by a militant Islamist ideology, and under the command of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. ISIL, indeed, is fighting as a single entity to establish an Islamic Caliphate. Overall, we really should really wait until events play themselves out before comparing ISIL to any previous historical phenomena, let alone the Crusades.

Is Mr. Obama therefore wrong in what he said? No. Christians should be impartial enough to recognize that people have done great evil in the name of Christ, just as people have done evil in the name of anything else that is good in the world. What is evil if not the corruption of the good? Christians have done great evil, but that’s something that Christians should learn from each and every day.

What Christians shouldn’t be doing in response to Mr. Obama’s remarks is to respond to them with a siege-mentality, which takes a turtled stance on the issue based on the pig-headed notion that the rest of society is out to get them. At Catholic Memes's "ISIS versus Crusades," one can see such a siege-mentality in the knee-jerk reaction that the Crusades were everywhere and anywhere a glorious endeavor meant to defend Christendom. It’s a laughable response, really, and betrays a sensitivity to inevitable criticism that no impartial persons should have. Unfortunately, the world isn’t black and white, nor is it Crusades versus ISIS.

In the long run, the siege-mentality does most harm to the people entertaining it because it reveals that they are sensitive about their beliefs, and why would anyone who is confident in their beliefs be sensitive to criticism?

03/25/2014

The ever scribbling Fr. Z wrote earlier today on the nature of mercy on this side of heaven in a recent blog post, "When 'No!' Is PASTORAL!" Definitely worth reading:

Mercy, on this side of heaven, is always medicinal. It is never final and absolute.

Obviously a person who is absolved, is truly absolved. But the absolution is opened out to the rest of life and the life beyond. It is medicinal. The sacrament of penance isn’t the ultimate judgment.

All mercy, on this side of the grass, is medicinal.

When Our Lord showed the woman caught in adultery His mercy, He told her “Go and sin no more”. His mercy was medicinal. His Mercy was the drawing of the scalpel, the excision of the tumor, the debridement of the wound.

Augustine spoke and wrote of Christ as Medicus, the Physician. In terms understood well in the ancient world, by the state of medicine at the time, the doctor doesn’t stop cutting just because the patient is screaming for him to stop. For the mommy bloggers out there, it is the prick of the needle at the doctor’s office, even though little stupor mundi is writhing away from the white coat.

01/11/2014

If one wants to understand Francis’ thinking about the poor, it would be good to look objectively at his much talked about, but little-read Apostolic Exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel.” It soon becomes apparent that much of this Exhortation is an extension of a keen insight that Jorge Bergoglio had when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires:

We cannot respond with truth to the challenge of eradicating exclusion and poverty if the poor continue to be objects, targets of the action of the state and other organizations in a paternalistic and aid-based sense, instead of subjects, where the state and society create social conditions that promote and safeguard their rights and allow them to be builders of their own destiny.

As one who has promoted a free economy as a normative way to assisting people out of poverty, I find two innovative challenges in these words which could go a long way to depoliticizing the debate about wealth and poverty.

Imagine if all of those presently engaged in the debate on these matters began to ask questions such as, “What excludes the poor from the process of prosperity?” or “What would a society look like that no longer considers the poor as objects of paternalistic aid but rather as potential shapers of their own destiny?”

The particular details of policy prescriptions are not the heart and soul of Francis’ incredible attraction on the part of people throughout the world. It is not his political motivation that moves us as we witness his embrace by — and of — frail human life.

More than worth reading in full. The topic of non-overlapping magisteria is just as true for the Catholic Church and biological evolution as it is for the Catholic Church and economics. What ought to be emphasized from Pope Francis’ teachings is therefore not a discussion of the cause-and-effect explanation of current poverty, but how we morally view the person within that cause-and-effect explanation. Pope Francis cannot teach us whether cutting the corporate tax rate would be a good thing for, say, the American economy, but he can teach us about how we can appreciate dignity of a human being, and how institutions should respect that. The point of Catholic social teaching is not to provide technocratic advice for accomplishing political goals, but to provide a witness for the Gospel within the context of human interactions within society at large.